Drugs Today

For young people growing up today in cities unemploted the avenues of destruction are so much greater than they were for my generation that too found the poor in northern cities spewed out fom schools in to recession. We found our way to cannabis, LSD , a psychedelic underground where creativity was rife. Politics was in our blood and drawn together by a hatred of Margaret Thatcher many took to the road and discovered the countryside in beat up trucks, vans and buses. Our days were numbered and a dark and evil police force, hardened by miners strikes and the battle of Orgreave brought our fun to an end. It was to be another decade before heroin flooded in and turned council estates in to crime riddled opiation. The timing of the Afhgany farmers shift from making oily black hashish after the Mojahadin had seen off the Russians to producing poppys couldnt have had a more disastrous effect on our poor. Now our jails are flooded with innocents guilty of nothing but addiction. How drug culture changed has been a profound perpetuator of the rich poor divide. The gap is now bigger than ever and the cultural loopholes that allowed people like myself  and the generations of punk and later british art to find upward mobillity have closed. The country has now sealed itself in to the two worlds and it seems this barrier is now permanent. Our war in Afhganistan has reinforced this wall in our early support of the Norhern Alliance who grew heroin poppies which the Taliban were initially against but now use to fund thier work. The countries president is a smackhead. So heroin will continue to flow as it is in both sides interests. The escape routes for the poor are now so few and the heroin culture so ingrained that it will take decades before we see change The crack epedemic compounded the problem but by comparrison, on the social scale is trivial as the middle class hoover up cocaine powder at an incredible rate. Drug culture is incredibly important to understanding society, a tenth of the worlds economy is in drugs.